This, that, and the other

So the rogue/priest duo for 2v2 has gotten some slight nerfs. Problems? Probably not enough. The mana burn change should help more than the blind sharing DR with fear change probably. At least for me since I run with a disc priest/ret combo and with two trinkets I can afford to break up CC chains that little bit easier. Will Ret/Priest dominate the charts? I doubt it. There just aren't enough of them compared to rogue/priest teams.

I'm done raiding so I don't have to worry about updating about that anymore. I went and bought Empire: Total War. I'm a little bit disappointed. The combat part is still ridiculously confusing, and honestly not worth my time to try and learn how to play. 1 hour limit on a match against a computer?! No thank you. I spend the entire time stuck in slow mode anyway since I'm trying to order troops around. And no, micro managing is not fun. I should probably just spend a little more time on it, but I love the campaign mode too much. Or at least I did in Medieval: Total War. 3d was a bad idea. Or whatever they call this wax figurine look. Honestly, the campaign map just looks confusing. The controls are still iffy as well. This is supposed to be a strategic game, but when you move a unit, you've moved a unit. Even if you didn't mean to. And there is no quick 'cancel/stop move' button either. You hit escape and nothing happens but the menu asks you if you want to quit the game. I give it a 7/10 honestly. It gains +'s because I love the context, but -'s for how horrible the interface is. The tutorial doesn't explain anything either. So yeah, 6/10, because after 10 hours of playing I still don't know about half the boxes. And what the hell happened to being allowed to tax places separately?! I can either not tax them at all, or I can tax them the same as the rest of the theater... honestly, what the hell were those developers thinking. That doesn't add realism, it adds retarded.

I'll still play the game, but 6/10. Which is sad, because Medieval: Total War was so good, but then they just screwed it up more and more with everything after it. I don't mention naval battles at all because TBH, I haven't felt like trying it after the Land battle is still the same mess it's always been. I'd much prefer a turn based option for land battle, then this real time waste.

Empire: Total War

I think the gaming companies have finally developed the perfect way to prevent pirating. Release their games broken and then slowly fix them over the next couple of months with patches, so that every time somebody finishes a complete upload of the game, a new patch comes out and the people trying to create the hacked versions have to either do it all over again, or just fix the hacked part. Granted patches are usually hacked in a timely manner, when a company releases patch after patch after patch almost once a week, well... I can imagine even the most devoted hackers would get tired of redoing the same thing over and over.

The game looks great to play, the reviews talk about how great the game is, and yet I still haven't gone out and bought it. $50 just does not feel worth it to play a game like Empire: Total War. Though honestly I'm surprised they aren't charging $70 or more yet, considering everything else has inflated over the years, while the price of computer games has seemed rather stagnant for the last decade. I want to play it. But I can't think of when I would have time to play it. I don't even raid in WoW right now and my time feels better spent enjoying free forms of entertainment, and thankfully legitimate ones through Hulu.com. What a wonderful site, for now. It will probably run out of entertaining content quickly, since I don't like sitcoms. If only they had the History Channel and not just Nova. Nova is great, but... you go to watch an episode on ants, and it's not actually about ants, it's about this guy who used his study of ants to explain social patterns in society. I mean come on now... teach me more about ants! The last 15 minutes or so of the episode didn't even involve ants at all, it involved monkeys on an island!

WoW Update: I cannot arena at the moment because my arena partner xferred servers and I have not been able to follow yet. So I am stuck, not doing arenas, BG's get worse every week, and raiding has stopped completely. I don't need to spend 16 hours a week raiding, not when finding a guild is rather laborious and often a fruitless pursuit. The last one I was in lost the raid leaders, and then two of the three tanks, and then the 2 guild masters that caused all the drama went AFK again after messing everything up. I don't know why the raid leader didn't just remake the guild, but whatever. So WoW is incredibly boring right now. Ulduar is an impenetrable road block unless you're in a serious guild, 10 man raids don't offer any gear upgrades from what I already have, and PvP is stagnant and hasn't changed for 5 seasons, going on 6. I can't wait to find a new game. Sad to say, I am mostly looking forward to new Blizzard games. Diablo 3 and their currently unannounced MMO.